Community and Accountability

I remember grabbing dinner with a friend one Sunday night after a day long session during Seth Godin’s AltMBA. It was March, the air was crisp and we were walking to a neighborhood Mexican joint. I had just spent eight hours online working on a project with my team and I STILL had hours of work to publish my assignment before the midnight deadline. But had to eat dinner first.

I remember telling my friend about the program and what it was trying to do for us, the students. As I was telling him about the program, I realized something big about myself: I’m happiest when I’m working hard at something I care about with other people.

I hate the altMBA term “leveling up.” There’s something about it that feels douchy. The maximalist connotation about it leaves me cold. Nonetheless, the program did “level” us up. I, and most of us, felt more capable, more productive, than we have in years. It was a real blessing.

Most people after the course have felt an inevitable slide. Whatever promises we made at the end of the program to keep producing, to keep focused, we’ve broken. Part of it is inevitable. it was a sprint. You can’t sprint forever.

The gains you get from a sprint don’t last forever either. You have to keep at it.

The metaphor I have is an airplane. An airplane uses most of its fuel to reach altitude. Crucially, you have to keep on adding little bits of fuel to the plane. Otherwise it starts to drift down.

The other part is that we don’t have the community and the work anymore. Yes, some of us have formed accountability groups and others have stayed connected on Slack. But we don’t have the joint commitment to something that ties us together.

What I’ve realized is the work creates the community and the community creates the work. In America, we have the model of the solitary hero, working with singular focus and determination to make change. Life isn’t really like that.

That’s why we created GameChangers GO. It’s not a sprint. It’s a longer term engagement with a community to maintain the changes in you and the accountability to the changes you want to make in the world.

Real lasting change isn’t a game for lonely heroes. “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” the proverb goes. Any real change you want to make will require going together.